Brave Whacktagonal Knights: Before the Game

I was late because I was distracted. Distraction was a theme of the day. The night before I'd taken the train home. The train had struck a car. The train had been stuck for an hour and a half and so had I. I hadn't slept much; dreams were disturbed. The train operator had seen the car, had known the train couldn't brake in time. Had the train operator seen that the car was empty? These thoughts are not conducive to a peaceful life, not conducive to sleep. So that was the night before.

Today was BANG 17, a puzzlehunt-ish game. I was sleepy. I was supposed to bring a prize for the game, had left it by the door so that I wouldn't forget. I forgot anyhow.

In Berkeley, I slouched past Games of Berkeley, realized that I'd forgotten to bring a prize. Fortunately, G.o.B. was open. I groggily purhcased some pretty blocks. The cashier had trouble ringing up my order. She apologized--she hadn't got much sleep the night before. She had my sympathy. My next stop on the way to campus was Starbucks where I tossed back a conveniently-tepid double espresso. Soon I was... not exactly awake. I was twitchy.

At the U.C. Berkeley library, I returned a book. There was still plenty of time before I was supposed to meet my teammates. We were to be the team Order of the Knights of the Whacktogon, but not yet, not yet. There was time to dawdle. I thought to snap some photos of library hand trucks. That took a while, but I didn't notice. My phone vibrated--I had missed a call. Not surprising, since I was in the underground book stacks area. Looking more closely at my phone's display, I saw I was running late.

Lunch on the Lawn Mini-Reunion

The team had arranged to meet ahead of time. The game was starting on U.C. Berkeley's west lawn. Most folks on the team had worked in downtown Berkeley--either for Berkeley Geoworks or for Blue Mug. We'd had a "Lunch on the Lawn" tradition--once a week, most folks in the office would bring their lunch to the lawn, eat together, and play frisbee. I guess Andrea missed most of that--she'd joined up relatively late, was often busy for lunch. Arranging for BANG17, she wasn't sure where this "The Lawn" was that the rest of us kept refering to.

Nevertheless, Andrea was the only one of us who showed up on time. She hadn't slept much the night before. When she wasn't throwing together supplies for this game she'd been preparing for her thesis defense. And holding down a two-day-a-week internship--for which she'd just started a new project, one she was pretty excited about, which she'd been working some crazy hours on.

Next to show up was "Lofty" Dave Loftesness. He was just getting over a cold, a cold which Penny and Zoe were still wrestling with. He was pretty excited, though. He and Penny had escaped from A9.com, were working at Foxmarks, and life was looking brighter, aside from the cold and a broken hard drive.

Next Paul du Bois showed up with his Doublefine co-worker "Smart Pete", also known as Pete Demoreuille. Paul was excited to be moving to San Francisco. He and Anisa had been living in San Jose so that each of them could have an awful commute--her to Monterey, him to San Francisco. But Anisa had landed a telecommuting job, halfway untethering them.

In short, we had a lot of cathing up to do. It didn't help that I was oozing so much caffeine that I couldn't stay focused on what anyone was saying for more than a few seconds at a time. I think Paul told me why he was moving three times before I finally absorbed it. We talked so much that I never even fetched the traditional Lunch-on-the-Lawn frisbee out of my backpack. I never even schmoozed with folks from other teams. But when the game organizers were ready for teams to register, I scrambled over.

Pregame with the Smoking GNU

After getting the lowdown from the organizers, I went back to the team to pass it on. This envelope we weren't allowed to open yet. This piece of paper had an introduction to the game, we could read that. One of us would need to be wrapped in aluminum foil for the pre-game activity: who wanted to be wrapped in foil? I waited a couple of ticks. OK, I would volunteer to be wrapped in foil.

In hindsight, maybe I should have waited a couple more ticks. I'm not sure how accurate my caffeinated "ticks" were. Since I had volunteered, I was to wander over to another team to be wrapped in foil--and a member of that team would come over to our team to be likewise wrapped. Maybe this would be a good way for members of the team to get know each other--Paul and Andrea were FoaFs but didn't know each other; Smart Pete only knew Paul. Maybe it was a good thing for them all to get a chance to work with each other without my screaming out my caffeine jitters at them.

Most of Whacktagon Armors a GNU Knight
Photo by DLoft

I skittered over to the other team, who turned out to be The Smoking GNU. I put up my arms and said "Foil me." That name seemed familiar. They were preparing aluminum foil, studying their instructions. Apparently, they weren't just supposed to wrap me in aluminum foil. They were supposed to construct a suit of armor. It occurred to me that I had set myself a difficult task: to be armored in foil, I would need to stand still. I was still caffeinated, still twitchy. Still distractable--hey, where did I know the name "The Smoking GNU" from? I asked them: "Hey, are you guys signed up for the No More Secrets game?" and they were. They said that they also wanted to sign up for the upcoming Google puzzlehunt, but they didn't know enough Googlers who wanted to play. (For a team of 12 people, you needed at least four Googlers.) I asked them if they'd already played in some games; one of them had played in a Shinteki.

Soon I had been sufficiently wrapped in foil. Similarly, my teammates had wrapped a member of the Smoking GNU. Too late, I remembered the duct tape in my backpack--the perfect adhesive for assembling tinfoil armor. It was time for the newly-armored folks to present themselves for photographing.

Click.

(Photo by Andrea Frome)

If I had been really hardcore, I would have gone through the rest of the day covered with tinfoil. But I was pretty glad to rip off that stuff. Soon I was standing with my team, with only occasional bits of foil stuck to me.

Someone walked up who I didn't know--he introduced himself as Paul. This wasn't Paul du Bois. This was the mysterious webmaster who had started the Bay Area Night Game wiki, a wonderful thing. We'd corresponded after a few sessions of wiki-spam-stomping, but we'd never met. So now we were meeting. Does it count as "meeting" if one of the people is whacked out on caffeine? I don't think we said much to each other before I got distracted by something out of the corner of my eye.

But I was twitchy, so I barked at my teammates. Had we finished with our registration paperwork? Here was a piece to turn in. There were instructions to read. And with these minutiae I was able to keep my brain from juddering apart for a few minutes until there was something else to occupy it: the game started.

Next: To Camelot 

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